I just finished the book Still Alice, about a Harvard professor who has early-onset Alzheimer's (age 50). It's quite terrifying; if I didn't love the friend who encouraged me to look it over, I'd throw it at her. I don't read books like this!

Without any scientific basis for it, I'd like to think that for many of us it's normal to forget a certain percentage, and that the quantity may increase but the percentage may be steady. I don't like the condescending assumption that I forgot something because I'm old: I've always forgotten stuff I should remember, and I've always been good at remembering stuff nobody else does. The latter just may not always be the most practical.

I agree. I have read (I can't remember where and am too lazy to LIU!) that we never forget, but that, if we do not access stuff we have remembered, we can't find where it is filed in our brain-storage discs when we want it some tomme later..

LukeJavan8
Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 06/23/08
Posts: 7141
Loc: Land of the Flat Water

A Forgettable Theoryfrom dan.lewis@gmail.com: "Now I Know:That's half the Battle".

Most of us have had this happen: You have a list of tasks to do and walk around your home or office, intent on accomplishing them. The first one is easy -- empty a garbage can or grab a document. You do it and quickly move onto the next, but when you exit the room, you can't manage to recall what the other tasks were. Try as you might, you mind draws a blank.

But don't blame it on getting older or lack of essential vitamins and nutrients in your diet. There's a much more likely culprit: the doorway you just walked through.

In November of 2011, a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, published a study which suggested that entering and exiting rooms can cause our short term memories to fail us. Their theory: our brains take items in our short term memories and stick them into virtual compartments, with different ideas in different areas -- much like a house or office has different rooms. When we cross through doorways in the physical world, our mental world also passes through what psychology professor and head researcher Gabriel Radvansky calls an "event boundary" -- an action which, in his words, "separates episodes of activity and files them away." Basically, when your body leaves the room, your mind leaves that "to do" list behind.

Unfortunately, one simply can't return to the room to pick up this virtual "to do" list. In one of the experiments Radvansky and his team conducted, his test subjects were asked to walk around from room to room only to end up where they began.

The full study, published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, is available.

Wow! That sounds very similar to Somebody's theory (I'll have to find shanks and ask him again) that it is good for the elderly to stay in familiar surroundings because seeing certain things will remind them of tasks they need to get done, such as eating.

I, though, have a different experience from what the Notre Dame people describe: if I physically go or turn back to the area where my previous thought of doing something told me was associated with it, I remember what I'd forgotten. It's not always in a different room, though; but sometimes it is.

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